It all began in 1973, when then Colonel Parkinson, of the U.S. Air Force, was appointed to lead a joint military program to build an advanced navigational system. When he arrived, competing factions from the Navy, Air Force, and other services, each promoting its own technological solutions, were threatening to sink the project. “It was a mess,” he says. His first duty was to find a compromise plan that all the services could support. Despite repeated efforts by the services to cancel the project, a team of only 200 individuals on a budget of just $390 million managed to build the system. GPS’s extreme precision went on to revolutionize warfare, and now it is revolutionizing civilian life, with a steady stream of new commercial applications….